Found the following information on Joeys blog:

If you’re like me and had to buy a usb sound card since the laptop’s onboard soundcard creates too much noise, and would like to have that card used by default when it’s plugged in, but otherwise have builtin card be used, create an /etc/udev/rules.d/00_local.rules containing:

# Default to using additional (USB) sound cards when they are available.
KERNEL=="pcmC[D0-9cp]*”, ACTION==”add”, PROGRAM=”/bin/sh -c ‘K=%k; K=$${K#pcmC}; K=$${K%%D*}; echo defaults.ctl.card $$K > /etc/asound.conf; echo defaults.pcm.card $$K >>/etc/asound.conf’”
KERNEL==”pcmC[D0-9cp]*”, ACTION==”remove”, PROGRAM=”/bin/sh -c ‘echo defaults.ctl.card 0 > /etc/asound.conf; echo defaults.pcm.card 0 >>/etc/asound.conf’”

Only programs started after the sound card is plugged in will use it of course, and this might not work if you have it plugged in while booting.

Link